Data management plans

Themes

Data management plans

What is this about?

Data management plans (DMPs) are formal documents in which researchers describe how they plan to use data during and after the research. This helps researchers in sharing their data according to the FAIR principles (findable, accessible, interoperable, and re-useable), as recommended by the European Code of Conduct (ECoC).

Why is this important?

Since research funders, organisations, reviewers, and individual researchers all have different needs from data management , DPMs are becoming integral parts of grant applications and research organisations. They are usually short, and state which data will be created and how. DMPs also define the plans for data sharing and presentation, prescribe how the data will be stored, who will have access to it, what documentation and metadata will be created with it, and how it will be preserved. Creating DMPs provides several benefits for researchers, such as reducing the loss of data, monitoring the research progress, and preparing data for future use. Apart from that, they are also time saving.

For whom is this important?

ResearchersResearch organisationsAcademic staffFundersPhD students

What are the best practices?

The use of DMPs in aeronautical and engineering projects in the 1960s expanded into other engineering and scientific fields in the late 1970 and 1980s. Their purpose was to help complex projects cope with their data management requirements during data collection or analysis stages. In the early 2000s the Organisation Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has recommended that “responsibility for the various aspects of data access and management should be established in relevant documents”, such as grant applications, and six major UK research funding bodies recommended that all funding bodies should mandate submission of DMPs with grant applications. Some of them have implemented the recommendation, among them Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust. Today, 86% of UK Research Councils and 63% of US funding bodies requires submission of DMPs with funding applications. DMPs have been created and promoted mostly by University libraries which have become “institutional centres of data management practice”. Two most known are the Digital Curation Centre and California Digital Library.

The Digital Curation Centre (DCC), a leading centre in digital information curation that gives advice and help on how to store, manage, protect and share digital research data, provides resources, such as online tools, guidance and training. One of them is DMP online, a free web-based tool that supports researchers in developing DMPs by providing them with templates and guidelines.

California Digital Library has also developed DMPTool, an open and international source project, that helps researchers, institutions, and funders in the USA in creating DMPs.

Science Europe, an association of Research Funding Organisations and Research Performing Organisations, has developed Practical Guide to the International Alignment or Research Data Management. This Guide, which provides a basis for development of data practices and management, has identified six main requirements for DMPs:

1.     Data description and collection or re-use of existing data

2.     Documentation and data quality

3.     Storage and backup during the research process

4.     Legal and ethical requirements, codes of conduct

5.     Data sharing and long-term preservation

6.     Data management responsibilities and resources.

Natalie Evans, Andrijana Perković Paloš contributed to this theme. Latest contribution was Jul 20, 2022

Other information

Virtues & Values

• Transparency
• Availability

Good Practices & Misconduct

• Open access
• Data management
• Grant applications